Lament for Leto (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Yes,” said Dame Beatrice, “so I understand, but I have not been fortunate enough to be present on such an occasion. Do you speak Greek?”

  “Well, Cambridge Greek, if you know what I mean. I can make myself understood in modern Greek, but it’s differently accented, as well as having, well, a rather different vocabulary.”

  “It would oblige me very much if you would go down to the stage and declaim. It is said that even from the topmost tier one has no difficulty in hearing what is said.”

  “Oh, all right,” said Julian, nothing loth. He descended to the furthest edge of the circular space at the foot of the tiers of stone benches and waved his hand to indicate that he was ready to begin. He had a pleasant, cultivated voice and his enunciation was good. He spoke—or, rather, recited—for several minutes, and then climbed up to where Dame Beatrice was seated and sat beside her.

  “That was Cambridge Greek,” he said, modestly hoping for her praise.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “It was part of the great speech in The Frogs where the Chorus gives the city ‘good counsel and instruction.’ ”

  “You could hear all right, then?”

  “Every syllable. I congratulate you, both on your mode of speech and on your memory.”

  “Oh, well, I was one of the understudies for the Greek play in my third year, and we did the Aristophanes. I never got the chance to play one of the parts—they only do the Greek play every three years, as you probably know—but by attending all the rehearsals I got most of the stuff by heart. I’m fortunate in having a particularly good verbal memory. I say, I wonder if I could talk to you about something.”

  “By ‘something’ you mean Miss Hero Metoulides, no doubt.”

  “Oh!” said Julian. “Well, yes. We had a row when we were on the ship and, although I think things went all right again, today she avoids me. She thinks I ought to put my foot down about being made to tag along with those boys, but what can I do? After all, it’s my job, and I’ve dodged the column too often. She must know how I feel about her, but she hasn’t made up her mind whether she feels the same about me. If only that chap Simon wasn’t about all the time, I think it might be different, but, because he’s a member of their household and yet no actual relation of hers, I’ve got him in my hair. I was wondering whether you’d advise me what to do. My trouble is, you see, that although I’ve heaps of potential, I haven’t really got going yet, and that means I haven’t any money. If only she weren’t an heiress I’d charge ahead regardless of everything, including this thing she’s probably got about Simon, but there’s still a prejudice about proposing to a wealthy girl when you haven’t a bean of your own.”

  “Oh, in these days, when so many professional women earn more than their husbands, I don’t think it matters much which of you has the money. It is much better for the wife to be rich than for neither of you to be well-off, don’t you think?” said Dame Beatrice. “Besides, you say you have a future, and your assets are brains, charm, and determination, I’m sure. In any case, Simonides is too young for Hero, I think, and I’m certain she knows it. For other reasons at which I can hazard a guess, I do not believe that Mr. Dick would sanction the match.”

  “Well, thank you. You’ve certainly cheered me up,” said Julian.

  “A small return for the pleasure of hearing you addressing the Athenian citizens in such splendid fashion and in words which are as apt at the present day as ever they were in 405 B.C.,” Dame Beatrice assured him.

  As though she were an oracle, or perhaps because she was the only spiritual descendant of Asclepius there present, the next person to climb the steps of the theatre to invoke her aid was Ronald Dick.

  “How did they manage these wonderful acoustics?” she asked. “And in the open air, too. Julian has just been reciting to me from down there.”

  “It is thought that the builders sank great jars with their mouths acting as baffle plates,” he replied, “but I know nothing about the way sounds carry or what happens to them after they are made.” He seated himself beside her, as Julian had done. “Beatrice, I have a problem.”

  Dame Beatrice realised that to him it must be a serious one. He had never before used her Christian name without a prefix.

  “I thought everything was going splendidly,” she said.

  “I know, I know. It’s nothing to do with the expedition. I have no worries now on that score.”

  She waited, realising that he was trying to choose his words. Dick stared westwards towards the remains of the temple to Asclepius. Next to it were the remains of the hospital dormitory, the mysterious tholos where perhaps the healing serpents had been kept, and the remains (conjectural) of a hostel for pilgrims north of the temple and its adjuncts. When he spoke again it was abruptly and the content of his speech would have been sufficiently startling if Dame Beatrice had not already guessed the truth.

  “Hero and Simonides seem to have no idea that they are sister and brother,” he said.

  “Indeed?”

  “You are not surprised? You had not guessed, had you?”

  “Well, perhaps I had begun to wonder about it. To me they are much alike, and their coincident birthdays indicate that they must be twins. I have noticed that they entertain a good deal of natural affection for one another, and no doubt you are beginning to fear that this is turning to what is known (erroneously, I think) as unnatural affection. Is that your problem?”

  “I thought—I had always supposed, in spite of some of the legends which one associates with the Greeks—that persons of the same blood had an instinct in these matters. Until I happened to see Hero and Simonides together the other evening, I had no idea that their love for one another might be carnal.”

  “A crude expression, surely?”

  “I am not adept at expressing myself in words. The point is that they were locked in a close embrace and were kissing one another in what I can only describe as an abandoned fashion. This morning Simon asked me for Hero’s hand in marriage.”

  “That was very dutiful of him. What did you say?”

  “I’m afraid my courage failed me. I postponed saying what will have to be said sooner or later. I said there were reasons for with-holding my consent, and that I would discuss the matter later. How am I going to break it to him? He is an impulsive boy and very ardent. I dread to think of it, but he may have deflowered her already. Greece has much to answer for!”

  “Knowing what I do about Hero—little enough, I grant you, but I am a trained observer—I think your fears are groundless. She has the modern Greek concept, I am sure, of maidenly virtue, lively though she may seem.” She thought of Roger, sleeping on deck during the cruise, and of Mrs. Dearwater’s disclosures, and began to wonder.

  “You relieve my mind. All the same, I shall have to tell them,” said Dick. “Now is it best to have them both together when I do so, or would it be wiser and kinder to talk to them separately?”

  “Are you asking for my advice?”

  “If you will be so good.”

  “I think you had better speak to Simon and leave Hero to me.”

  “Oh, Beatrice, that is really terribly good of you, although mine, I fancy, may be the more trying interview. Fortunately Hero has some regard, I believe, for young Mr. Suffolk, and I do not think there is any doubt about his feeling for her.”

  “I also am in no doubt about that,” said Dame Beatrice.

  “I like young Suffolk and he would be a steadying influence on Hero, who may appear more adult than Simon, but who has inherited not only her Greek father’s volatile characteristics but something of her mother’s selfishness,” Dick went on.

  “Ah, yes. Who was her mother?” Dame Beatrice innocently enquired. Dick gave her a very peculiar look.

  “Perhaps the less said about that the better, if you will forgive me for keeping you in the dark,” he said. “It is a subject which, for me, has a painful connotation.”

  “I understand. It is fascinating how wheels, from their very nature, tend
to come full cycle. And Mrs. Cowie, I gather, is to some extent involved, but it does not seem to me that your children—if I may call them that—are aware of it.”

  “Actually, as you have guessed, she is related to them, but she does not know it, either, and I trust that you will not mention it to her. I am not sure that she would find the connection an agreeable one. I know you won’t press me for details.”

  “I am no mathematician,” said Dame Beatrice, “but I know when two and two make four.” She gave him her disquieting saurian smile. “I do not need any details.”

  Her next visitor was Chloe Cowie. She seated herself with a tired or perhaps a discontented sigh.

  “What is the difference,” she demanded, “between a man and a botanist?”

  “A botanist can be of either sex.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that! Henry wants to climb rocks, and his only interest in going to Delphi is to find specimens of horehound and various spurges and tulips and orchids. I’m devoted to flowers, naturally, but I don’t want to scramble about to find them. He has been fretting, too, in the most boring and unnecessary way, because we did not visit more of the Cyclades, and he was quite unkind when that clumsy young man hurt me so much the other day and I had to be helped back to the yacht. Then you yourself know in what a cavalier way he spoke to me when I was almost thrown overboard by that dangerous Greek girl and might have been attacked by a shark. I am beginning to wonder what my married life is to be. A man who thinks more of his obscure and revolting plants than he does of his wife is going to make a very inconsiderate husband. As for Ronald Dick, well, I could have an easy conquest there, but how could I dare to live in the same house as Hero?”

  “Later on,” said Dame Beatrice, “you may be very glad to have married a man who has an overriding hobby. Think how your work would suffer if he expected you to be always at his disposal. I refer, of course, to Mr. Owen.”

  “But that’s just what he does expect,” complained Chloe. “He can’t understand it that I don’t like scrambling about and spraining my ankles and getting stuck on dangerous ledges. Oh, Dame Beatrice, do you think I’ve made a mistake in accepting him? I begin to believe I have.”

  “Well, if you think so, there is still time to rectify matters, is there not?”

  “But what reason could I give? Besides, apart from this monomania of his, I find him extremely attractive. He is such a glorious brute of a man, so different from poor Ronald Dick who, as I say, certainly would make me an offer if I were free.”

  “You would be little better off, I fear. Mr. Dick is also a monomaniac. Would you wish to spend your married life living on archaeological sites and assembling potsherds?”

  “But, of course, there are those two growing boys,” said Chloe, ignoring the question, “and, on Ronald’s side, not only Hero but Simonides.” She sighed again, sepulchrally this time, and added, “I wish I knew what to do. I’ve a very good mind to go home.”

  * * *

  * Margaret L. Woods—Genius Loci.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Calliope, the Muse of Epic Poetry

  “. . . Pan, the rustical god . . . embracing and teaching the mountain goddess Echo to tune her songs and pipes, by whom were feeding the young and tender goats . . .”

  From Argos the way went due south to Lerna and then in a series of bends on a mountain road to Tripolis, where the party spent the night. On the following morning the two cars left the main road at Megalopolis for a secondary thoroughfare which took the pilgrims through Karytena to Andritsena where again they put up for the night. From the hotel they went twice to Bassae.

  Here, in the morning, the party broke up into companionable groups. Henry Owen and his sons climbed and scrambled on the rocky mountainside, Henry in search of wild flowers, the boys for exercise. Julian and Hero once more appropriated one another while Simonides good-naturedly escorted Chloe (who had firmly refused to climb rocks) and Dick partnered Mary. Dame Beatrice allotted to herself the role of the cat who walked by himself for, as time went on, she found that she had little in common with some members of the expedition and enjoyed her own company better than theirs. They, for their part, felt that she now knew too much about them to make her a comfortable companion, although that was not her fault.

  When she looked back on the tour much later on, she realised that only when they reached Bassae had there appeared to be no real hindrance to anyone’s immediate pleasure, and on their first visit to the temple of Apollo this was true. On that radiant morning it seemed to her as though, in that rare atmosphere, on that awe-inspiring mountain, petty ills and frets could have no power and would lack any kind of significance. The total absorption of the lovers in one another made Ronald Dick’s former anxiety about Hero and Simon appear unnecessary and even slightly ridiculous; Chloe made no complaint of fears and suffered no minor accidents; Simon was gay and charming and she appeared to enjoy his company, and even Mary, with Dick, but looking wistfully after Hero and Julian as they climbed hand in hand towards the temple, was at least out of earshot of her aunt. Perhaps best of all, no ventriloquist practised his previously mischievous art or indulged his out-of-place sense of humour. All was peace on the broken, majestic mountain, as though Apollo himself had lingered to bless these visitors to his shrine.

  The temple was beautifully sited nearly four thousand feet up Kotylion Mountain and was dedicated to the god in his title of Epicourios, for its cella was a shrine of healing. Dame Beatrice remembered having seen parts of the temple frieze in the British Museum. There was a representation of Theseus fighting with the Amazons and another of a battle between Lapiths and centaurs, but there was pity as well as terror depicted, tenderness as well as brutality—an Amazon pleading for her enemy, the wounded being carried from the field.

  The building (except for the Hephaisteion in Athens) was the best preserved in Greece. It was very long for its width and not only was its Doric peristyle remarkably complete, but two rows of engraved Ionic and two separate Corinthian columns still remained standing within its cella, in whose bays sick pilgrims had slept in the hope that the god would grant them the blessing of a cure.

  Dame Beatrice still wandered alone, preferring solitude and her own thoughts and impressions to conversation and discussion. She spoke to nobody but an elderly goatherd wearing the countryman’s pleated kilt, who greeted her with patriarchal courtesy before, with his horned flock, he picked his way, staff in hand, among the broken stones of the hillside amid the tinkling of the goatbells which, day after day, for him was the only sound which broke the solemn peace of the wild Arcadian mountain.

  In the late afternoon, at Dick’s insistence, the party, except for Henry Owen and Edmund, returned to Bassae to watch the sunset. It spilled shadows of rose and purple on granite rocks and pinnacles and threw the temple, which faced north-south, into stark and awe-inspiring grandeur, so that it seemed to exist as part of the mountains themselves, dominating its setting and defying nature with its insistence upon the god-given genius of man.

  It was after the return to the hotel that the first major crisis which led to the final disintegration of the pilgrimage was triggered off by Mary. It began, in the most innocent way imaginable, with a remark she made as they were leaving the cars preparatory to going up to their rooms to change for dinner, which they were to take at half-past nine.

  “The temple was built as a thank-offering for deliverance from the plague,” she observed.

  “So we are told,” said her aunt, with condescending amiability. “What of it? Does it matter for what reason it was built, so long as it was built and so long as we were able to go and look at it?”

  “It is believed that Iktinos, the architect of the Parthenon, built it,” said Dick. “Until 1959 there was no passable road to it. The mountain used to be the haunt of brigands and in 1766 a French architect who had happened upon the temple site when he was exploring the countryside on holiday the previous year and had decided to return to it, was murdered by a band
of them.”

  “Why are brigands, pirates, and highwaymen always presented to us as colourful and romantic characters?” asked Hero. “As for the temple, I wish it were still inaccessible. It is too strange and too frightening to be visited.”

  “You did not seem to find it so when you went to it with Julian,” said Mary. “Personally, I consider it awe-inspiring and grand, and I think . . .”

  “I wonder whether the sick pilgrims were really cured?” said Chloe, interrupting her. “If so, they were luckier than I. I’m sure I got a mosquito bite this evening. It is the time of day the wretched insects like best.”

  “Oh, you always make such fuss about your bites! Why can’t you allow us to conduct an intelligent conversation for once? Who wants to talk about mosquitoes when we’ve just had such a glorious experience?” demanded Mary, with irritable boldness.

  “Really, Mary!” said Chloe, obviously taken aback by this outburst. “That is a most uncouth manner in which to address me. I think you forget yourself, don’t you? And I do not make a fuss. Insect bites can turn poisonous and you know how sensitive I am to them.”

  “It was I who got those terrible bites last summer when you would insist that we followed that stream until we walked into a swamp,” said Mary, in a quieter tone.

  “Julian,” said Hero, “do you dare to come back to the temple with me after dinner?”

  “Good Lord, no,” said Julian. “Don’t be a fathead. Do you want us both to break our necks on the rubble?”

  “Oh, I thought we might ask the god to favour us, but, if you are afraid, we will not go.”

  “I shouldn’t, if I were you,” said Mary, loitering near them. “The god might say it with thunderbolts. If you want to visit the temple again, Hero, you should go at dawn. Let me know, and I will come with you.”

  Hero laughed.

  “I like only to go with Julian and at night,” she said, “to have audience with the spirit of the place. I felt something there which I could not explain. Everyone talks of Delphi and the Oracle, but I think the voice of Apollo is to be heard most clearly at Bassae. I think he tells me to go with Julian to church later on, too.”